What this lab is and what it's trying to find out.

I built a network emulation platform that runs real routing stacks against real orbital mechanics. FRR instances running as Kubernetes pods, one per satellite and ground station, with link state driven by actual orbital physics. The constellation moves, links come and go based on geometry and visibility, and the routing protocol has to deal with it. Everything runs continuously at whatever constellation scale you throw at it.

The reason it exists is pretty simple: the industry is arguing about whether standard routing protocols can handle mega-constellations, and almost nobody is publishing reproducible data to back up their position. (Post #001 breaks down that debate in detail.) I got tired of the argument and built an environment that can produce actual measurements.

What the lab runs

The emulation engine takes the primitives defined in Post #002: satellite types, constellation geometry, ground stations, and routing stacks. You pick a Walker Delta, a Walker Star, or whatever custom geometry you want. The engine computes satellite positions, works out visibility and ISL physics, and generates link events. The FRR containers see those as real interface state changes. The measurement infrastructure captures convergence timing, path stability, and forwarding state throughout.

I also use this to test alternative architectures. NodalPath is a proactive approach that computes paths from the orbital timeline ahead of time and pushes MPLS label stacks to nodes before the links even transition. Whether that actually produces better results than reactive IS-IS is the experiment, not something I'm assuming.